Matteo Marsili of ICTP's Condensed Matter and Statistical Physics section, along with a group of interdisciplinary researchers, have published results of their research on "Identifying essential genes in Escherichia coli from a metabolic optimization principle."

The research proposes a constraint-based model of cellular metabolism in order to characterise flux states in metabolic networks, which is able to reproduce the correct statistics of fluxes and whose results compare well with the available experimental evidence on individual fluxes. Essential genes in E. coli are found to correspond to reaction with strongly constrained fluxes.

The research was published in the 24 February edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.